Compound Testimonies: Social Critique and/as Life Narration

Abstract

The paper proposes to focus on the life-narration of Pandita Ramabai’s life through her slim autobiographical summary, My Testimony(1907) with occasional reference to her letters. It suggests that her subject position and ideology is equally manifested in her critique of upper caste Hindu practices, The High Caste Hindu Woman(1887).The critique of Brahmanical patriarchy, along with glimpses into Ramabai’s life, can perhaps lay claim to being studied as a sort of a biography of a collectivity. Through reading various accounts of Pandita Ramabai’slife  along with her social documentation and critique, the paper  proposes to foreground the nuances of reading gendered life-narratives. While it is acknowledged that there is no single matrix or method to read and interpret life narratives, the paper seeks to demonstrate that social documentation could be a form of autobiography, albeit that of a collectivity.